a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information around your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine individually, with friends, or with groups, teams and communities.

yawn. been there, done that. right? except that Twine is semantic. It –

… automatically organizes information, learns about interests and makes recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it gets to know you and the more useful it becomes.

In Twine not all tags are equal. A book’s author’s name is not the same as the place he lives or the organization he’s affiliated with. And not all things are equal, a book is not a bookmark, is not a video about it. Twine distinguishes between things, and tries to display content appropriately to its type. It also tries, with some success, to guess types tags and categories. Really interesting stuff. And it’ll be even more interesting when they get it to work properly (they’re not that far).

Another intersting thing about it is that everything is a twine, which is a kind of stream of stuff, and you can tune to, create and interleave many twines. So there’s the stuff I share with my family, the stuff I share with my office friends, the stuff I share with my highschool mates. There are some overlaps and cross-connections and I can manage them all by routing items to twines and inviting people to listen to the relevant threads.

A fresh approach, but is it too complex? It looks like its been designed for networked minds. Those of us who have been to all the twitters and pownces and are ready to move on. How many are there? And will our normal friends be able to follow a single twine, ignoring the rest? Time will tell.